Wired | AI systems will prove useful long before they become self aware

August 29, 2014

Ray Kurzweil, a leading proponent of the search for a sentient computer system notes, “IBM’s Watson is not quite at human levels in its ability to understand human language.

“If it were, we would be at the Turing test level now. Yet it was able to defeat the best humans in the game show Jeopardy! This is because of the inherent speed and reliability of memory that computers have,” Kurzweil said.

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“Speaking of Artificial Intelligence, we are already interacting with its virtual avatar in the form of computer video games. When you’re playing a video game especially as single player, in games like chess, you are competing against computerized intelligence.”

This is exactly right, yet it’s amazing how few people seem to realize or think about this.

This is such a neglected topic that on YouTube, using the search term “artificial intelligence video games” you will find several of my own videos on the subject come up on the first and second page of results!

This is remarkable when you consider that there are literally tens of millions of videos on YouTube on general videogameplay. Despite the seeming prominence of my videos in this search, they have gotten very few views; it’s just not a term that very many people search for.

The indifference of the public on this subject is so great that, until recently, The Wikipedia entry on Artificial Intelligence in Video Games defined game AI as merely producing the illusion of intelligence, rather than actual intelligence (I helped get the entry changed).

The game I examine on my Youtube channel shows so many signs of human intelligence that I have to conclude that it is truly sentient in certain ways, and it baffles me that so few other people seem to have noticed it, or even care about it! I chalk it up to an aversion to the idea of artificial intelligence in general.